As November settles in and the calendar drifts toward that final Thursday, most folks expect a column about turkey, dressing, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, and cranberries. But I’ve never been drawn to the menu of the day. Instead of writing about a holiday, I write about a state of mind— a spirit in the heart, a way of life—and I hope to spread that story to everyone who reads this paper. Thanksgiving, as I understand it, isn’t something you celebrate once a year. It isn’t confined to a crowded table or a football game humming in the background. At its core,Thanksgivingisamanner of living: a posture of the soul, a daily discipline that refuses to let trouble be the whole tale. It is the quiet choice to see blessing where others see lack, to lift your eyes beyond what is missing and give thanks for what remains.
There’s a reason Scripture doesn’t suggest gratitude—it commands it. “In everything give thanks,” the Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 5:18, as if he knew how easily the human mind can sink into fear when left to its own devices. And in Philippians 4:6-7, he ties thanksgiving directly to peace: “Be anxious for nothing… but in everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.” Then comes the promise that feels like a warm blanket thrown across cold shoulders: “and the peace of God… shall keep your hearts and minds.” Those words were not written for people who had cushioned lives. They were forged for the worn, the worried, the weary— the very people most in need of something solid to stand on.
Those words weren’t put together for poetic effect; they were survival instructions. They were given to real, fleshand- blood people who woke up with fears, worries, bills on the table, and burdens on their chests—just like us. And they resonate more loudly today than ever, in a world that moves quickly and feeds on anxiety like a furnace that never runs out of coal.
And here’s what I love: two thousand years later, the mental-health profession finally caught up with Scripture.
Whatmodernresearchcalls “mental health benefits,” the old saints simply called the fruit of a thankful spirit. A grateful heart steadies itself. Study after study now shows what the old saints understood instinctively—that a thankful spirit is medicine for the mind. Neuroscientists have found that gratitude calms the amygdala, the brain’s fear center, reducing anxiety before it has a chance to take root. Psychologists have proven that people whopracticedailygratitudeexperience lower stress hormone levels, improved sleep, steadier moods, greater resilience, and even measurable decreases in depression. Therapists prescribe gratitude practices as antidotes to spiraling thoughts, because they know what the Bible taught long before brain scans confirmed it: you cannot be grateful and hopeless at the same time.
A thankful heart steadies itself. It slows the breath. It quiets the nervous system. It pulls a person back from the cliff edge of dread. Gratitude doesn’t deny hardship—it simply refuses to let hardship have the final say. It builds emotional spine, the kind a person leans on when life’s winds blow hard and cold. It sharpens perspective, reminding us that even in the darkest seasons there are embers of goodness still glowing if we will only look for them.
Thanksgiving does not erase trouble. It does not hide grief or smooth over life’s rough edges. But it gives a man something firm to hold on to. It keeps a person from collapsing inward under the weight of their circumstances. It draws the heart back toward what remains steady and true—toward blessings we might overlook when fear has its hand on the wheel. A grateful spirit is like an anchor cast deep into bedrock; storms may come, but the soul stays moored.
And that, more than anything else, is why Thanksgiving is not just a day on the calendar. It is a way of life—one that heals, strengthens, and restores.
In my first two years of writing this column, I introduced you to Lucy Payne and Dassie May. Two women who lived difficult lives, marked by hardships and loss. But despite those difficulties, they were always thankful for what they had, and they never focused on what they did not have. This year, as I thought about who to write about, my mind kept circling back to my friend Clarence Hudson. His story is not one of comfort or ease, either. It is the story of a Black child born in 1950, during the thick of the Jim Crow era, in a town that had not long before expelled every Black family from within its borders. Yes, Madill has its proud history, but it also carries scars, and among the deepest is the episode— now mostly forgotten—when white citizens forced all the Black residents out of town in the early 1900s. A century ago, Clarence’s very existence in Madill would have been impossible.
By the time he was born, Oil Mill Hill had existed as a carved-out, enclosed world on the eastern edge of town, where Black families lived because they had nowhere else to go. Oil Mill Hill was a tough place, a poor place—but it was theirs. And in that crucible, the seed of gratitude took root against all odds. That makes Clarence’s story not just fitting for Thanksgiving, but a reminder that thanksgiving itself is not born in comfort—it is forged in scarcity, practiced in lean seasons, and proven in the lives of those who choose to see blessings where others see only lack.
Clarence’sstoryisn’tdraped in ease or padded with comforts. It’s a story built in the old way—throughtesting,through loss, through grit, and through the slow, patient rise of a man who learned early how to lean into thankfulness even when life gave him little to be thankful for. He discovered the secret Paul was trying to teach, that gratitude isn’t a feeling but a posture, a way of walking through the world with open eyes and a steady spirit.
Clarence’s life is proof that thanksgiving isn’t just a holiday— year, remembering blessings big and small, his story reminds usthatgratitudeismore than grace before the meal. It is the ground beneath our feet.
Clarence Hudson’s life didn’t begin in comfort. It started in the lean margins of a world that gave nothing freely and required a boy to grow up with his hands open, his eyes sharp, and his spirit resilient. He was raised in a time when hard work wasn’t a virtue but a necessity, and thankfulness was something you learned not from blessings but from survival. The lessons that shaped him came early and without apology.
Clarence grew up in a household where every scrap mattered — every jar saved, every coat patched, every meal stretched one more night than it should’ve been. Life had a way of teaching a boy the value of things: a sturdy pair of shoes, a dollar that lasted, a warm stove on a bitter morning. These were not luxuries; these were lifelines. And through it all, young Clarence learned to meet the world not with complaint, but with a quiet nod — an understanding that life’sworthwasn’tmeasuredby ease but by endurance.
He speaks of those early years not with resentment but with a kind of reverence, as though he knew even then that hardship had been the forge that tempered him. And if you read the pages of his newautobiography,yourealize quickly that Clarence’s thankfulness was not born from ease. It sprang from hardship so deep and early he learned that gratitude wasn’t about having much; it was about recognizing the strength it took to keep going.
Clarence entered the world on July 4, 1950, during the wettest July Madill had seen in a century—rain pouring in sheets, thunder rolling across the prairie, the kind of storm that forces even the most seasoned farmers to look out the window and wait for the wind to decide its next move. Clarence’s father, Robert Anglus Hudson, was a handsome young man fresh out of the Army, still wearing his khaki uniform, black patent shoes, and aviator glasses when he first stepped off the Frisco passenger train in Madill after World War II. His mother, Lena Russell, was just fifteen when they met. Their love was young and formed in hard times, and within a few years, they had two babies—Linda Jean and Clarence.
And then tragedy intervened, swift and unforgiving. Robert found an old shotgun that had rusted in the elements. When he tried to break it apart, the barrel stuck. He lifted it toward his eye to inspect it. The butt of the gun struck the low ceiling, triggering a blast that tore pellets into his skull. Surgeons did what they could, but the medicine of 1952 was not the same as today’s. Robert lived for a while with seizures. And then one day, while walking across a field, a seizure struck him down,andhediedwherehefell. Clarence was only a baby. His mother, Lena, was seventeen.
There are crossroads in life when a young woman, no matter how strong, cannot stretch herself far enough to hold everything together. Lena did what survival demanded. She moved to Ponca City for work and left baby Clarence in the care of a relative named Aunt Mary, whose small home sat just south of Highway 199, not far from the Baptist church. It was a house without luxuries. Many nights, supper for Clarence was nothing more than sugar water stirred in a Del Monte corn can. Hunger was a familiar companion, and kindness was something that floated from neighbor to neighbor like a shared quilt— patchworked, frayed, but consistently enough to keep a child warm.
Miss Butney, Mother Parker and Mama Pig were neighbors who shaped Clarence long before he understood the full measure of their generosity. They fed him when Aunt Mary had nothing. They watched after him when the nights grew long and cold. And it was Mama Pig’s home—fragrant with lilies and roses—where Clarence often slept. She was small, caramel-skinned, with hair wrapped up in a bun that unraveled to her knees when she let it down. To Clarence, she felt like a guardian angel who lived in a tiny house on the Hill.
Those early years could have hardened him. But they didn’t. They softened him, somehow—gave him an instinct for gratitude that took root before he could name it. And then came the day that burned itself permanently into his memory.
Clarence was six. He came home at dusk, the streetlamps dim from lack of maintenance, mothsweavingdrunkencircles around the bulbs. He pushed open the door to the house. Silence greeted him—a wrong kind of silence, a silence that made the hair on the back of hisneckrise.AuntMarywasn’t at the door. She wasn’t moving around in the back room. He drew back the curtain that separated her sleeping space from the rest of the house, and there he found Aunt Mary. She was still, too still. She was gone.
A six-year-old boy found her, alone in that little house with the sagging porch and the empty pantry. It was another tragedy. Another fracture in a fragile beginning. But here is the part that never ceases to move me: Clarence does not tell that story with anger. He describes it with tenderness. He tells it with the tone of someone who remembers the love more than the loss.
Those early tragedies — the death of a father, the separation from a mother, the hunger, the loss of Aunt Mary — became the soil in which a remarkable life took root.
After Aunt Mary’s death, Clarence learned that his mother, Lena, had returned to Madill a year earlier with his sister Linda, and he settled back into the original homestead her family had built on Oil Mill Hill. Soon after her return, she met a man who would forever reshape Clarence’s life: Clarence Moore.
Clarence Moore was not a manofmanywords,buthewas a man of deep presence. Born in Arkansas, raised in Texas, moldedbypovertyandduty,he knew how to work, how to lead, and how to raise a boy. He was six feet two, strong as a railroad spike, and carried himself with the quiet authority of someone who understood hardship but never bowed to it. For years, he swungaten-poundmaulonthe Frisco line, driving spikes into the ties under the Oklahoma sun.Intheevenings,hetrained horses for ranchers across MarshallCounty—earningthe reputation of an actual horse whisperer.
It was Clarence Moore who became “Dad.” It was this man who steadied the world after so many early losses. And it was this man who taught young Clarence the rituals of work. He loved young Clarence into manhood. He taught him to work.Toendure.Andhetaught him what was important.
Every morning started with the roosters. Young Clarence would wake up before dawn, put on his jeans, and walk into the corral with a bucket of oats. Waiting at the far end was Midnight, the all-black stallion who seemed to enjoy terrorizing the small boy. Clarence would climb the fence, brace himself, and approach the trough while Midnight snorted and pawed at the dirt asawarning.Eachmorning,as soon as Clarence dumped the oats, Midnight would charge— hoovesthunderouslypounding the ground, like the sound of thunder trapped inside a horse’s body. Clarence would run for the fence, dive through the slats just in time, and fall to the grass while Midnight reared up in triumph before settling down to eat.
Fear turned into a lesson. Escape became a win. Over time, the pen became a place where a boy learned courage without realizing that’s what he was learning.
After the horses came the water. Before the city laid lines to Oil Mill Hill, Clarence and his father carried buckets from the artesian well or from the city pipe at Jesse Mae’s place— aquartermileroundtrip,made countless times in winter cold, summer heat, and rain that turned dirt roads into slick trenches. This wasn’t punishment. This was life. This was training. This was the quiet shaping of a work ethic that would later define a man.
Clarence’s mother, Lena, was the axis that the early world spun around, even if she wasmorestormthansunshine. By day she put on that crisp white maid’s dress with the blue-and-white apron, stepped into polished white shoes, and rode into town in the red panel vanwiththeotherwomenfrom Oil Mill Hill, headed to the fine homes on the west side where she scrubbed floors, cooked holiday dinners, and raised other people’s children as carefully as her own. First it was the Brillharts in Madill, then their daughter Ellen and her husband Dick Phillips of the Phillips 66 family in Bartlesville. Lena served them for decades, so faithfully that they paid her like a pensioned employee until the day she died. Then she came home, changed clothes, and did it all again for her own family— laundry in galvanized tubs, spotless floors, shirts scrubbed and line-dried, holiday meals that started with hog-killing smoke and ended with plates so full no one left hungry. She was flint and fire: that famous cocked head, the gold-capped, diamond-flashed smile that could charm anyone, and a temper that could whip a boy bloody over a hose left halfturned. It wasn’t gentle, and it wasn’t always fair, but it forged something in Clarence. She demanded neat clothes, hard work, and a straight back from a son growing up in a townwherehismotherentered through back doors to serve the people whose names everyone else spoke with reverence.
Oil Mill Hill was tough, but it thrived—bordered by the railroad tracks to the west, Highway 199 to the south, Wolf Street to the north, and Tenth Street on the east. The landwasruggedanduntamed, scatteredwithbatteredshacks, oak trees, scruffy brush, and patches of Johnson grass so toxic it could kill livestock. Kids split into “uphill” and “underhill”tribesandfoughtas often as they played. The world beyond those borders hardly existed. The white part of town lay across an invisible line the children rarely crossed. And yet inside those boundaries, life was rich in a way the outside world could never quantify.
Clarence grew up among men who framed his understanding ofmanhood.Menwho workeduntiltheirbonesached. Men who came home covered in dust and sweat, dropped their lunch pails on the table, and found the strength to take on odd jobs until the last light of day faded. Men like Orlando Watson, Manuel Morris,HaroldParker,Charlie Byars, Alfonso King, Reverend Jessie King, and the man who became his father. These men were the backbone of the Hill, the kind of men whose names never made the headlines but whose character deserved monuments.
They raised their families withoutwelfare,withouthandouts, without excuses. They walked to work because they had no cars. They endured Jim Crow with dignity. And they expected their children to work just as hard as they did. And Clarence absorbed all of this— the sweat, the discipline, the humility, the unspoken code of responsibility. He carried it with him into school. Into sports. Into adulthood.
Racewasnotanearlylesson for Clarence. It wasn’t a single moment of revelation or some childhood shock carved into memory. It was a slow dawning, a truth that rose over time like a sun he didn’t remember seeing break the horizon — only the light it cast. It came in the hand-me-down textbooks at Dunbar, previously used by the white students, with their covers frayed and their pages half missing. It came on long rides in the backs of buses. It came in the courthouse water fountains labeled for who could drink where, and in the movie theater balcony where Black families climbed the stairs while whites settled into the good seats below. None of these things announced themselves as cruelty to a child; they simply existed, a quiet architecture of separation that whispered, without needing a singleword:Youmaybesmart, you may be talented, you may bekind—butyoudonotbelong everywhere.
Yet what might have hardened another boy never found purchase in him. Resentment couldn’t grow in the soil he was raised in because the adults around him didn’t water it. They were too busy surviving, too focused on the essentials: work hard, stay focused, carry yourself with dignity, treat people right, and don’t let the world shrink your spirit. They hadenduredenoughbitterness intheirownlivestoknowitwas a poison, not a shield.
So, by the time Clarence made his way to Camrose Elementary, and later to Madill High School, he carried himself with an ease and confidence no one had taught him, but everyone noticed. Coaches like Harry Cheadle sharpened that confidence; teachers tended it with the few resources they had. And his friends — Black and white — accepted him in ways the wider world didn’t always mirror. Even the contradictions became lessons: how to walk gracefully through a world that welcomed him on Friday nights but not always on Monday mornings.
What the town couldn’t see — what history nearly missed altogether — was the way this boy, the son of a maid from Oil Mill Hill, began to outrun every line that segregation had drawn around him. On Friday nightsinLittleDixie,underthe lights of the Madill stadium, he wasn’t the boy hauling water jugs or dodging Midnight the horse or trying not to anger Lena. He wasn’t the child pushed to the balcony at the theater or handed castaway textbooks. He was a captain. A two-way starter. Part of a brotherhoodofBlackandwhite teammates who pushed deep into the playoffs year after year. And in track, he became a force — the boy who flew down the backstretch like something unbroken and unbreakable, who came from last to second in the final forty yards of the state mile relay and made college coaches sit up straighter.
And then came the night that would have been unthinkable just a decade earlier. Homecoming, 1968. Clarence — the maid’s boy, born into Jim Crow, raised on a patch of hard ground the town long ignored — walked to midfield in his captain’s uniform, escorting Dana Phillips, granddaughter of the Brillharts and daughter of the wealthy oil family his mother had served since she was thirteen years old. The two of them side by side under the stadium lights, the band playing, the crowd watching, the past and future brushing shoulders in front of the whole town.
The Civil Rights Act might not have changed much yet in Madill’s day-to-day reality, but that moment said more than legislation ever could. It was a quiet revolution — a reminder of how far one determined Black boy could rise, and just how much grit, sacrifice, and unshakeable will had been poured into him by the woman who scrubbed rich folks’ floors by day and raised a warrior by night.
College carried Clarence just thirty-six miles east from Madill, but stepping into Durant felt like crossing a border into a different country altogether — a place where the Civil Rights Act lived only on paper, where the old order clung to its routines with white-knuckled stubbornness, and where a Black boy learned quickly which streets to avoid after sunset. Little Dixie had never needed a Welcome sign to announce who belonged and who didn’t. The town’s Confederate monument, still standing today in front of the county courthouse, did that well enough —with “Lest We Forget” carved into its stone pedestal, as if daring the future itself to challenge the past.
Clarence already knew the world he was entering. He had grown up in a place where Black families didn’t take vacations, didn’t stay in hotels, didn’t sit down in restaurants — not because they couldn’t afford it, but because doing so could cost them their dignity or their lives. In Little Dixie, a front door wasn’t an invitation; it was a warning. A wise Black family did not test its luck. Clarence spent his childhood watching lights from cafés and diners sweep across the windows of passing cars without ever imagining he would someday sit inside one. Those places were for someone else, and it was safer not to pretend otherwise.
Heunderstoodthedangerin theory,butitsbrutalitybecame unmistakable in 1965, when his father, Clarence Moore, and two other Black railroad workers were injured just outside Durant. The ambulance crew arrived, saw Black men bleeding on the ground, and drove them past the Durant hospital — one mile away — all the way to Hugo, forty miles east. Everyone knew why. Durant’s hospital did not treat Black patients. A law could be signed in Washington, but in Bryan County, the culture still held the pen.
That was the soil his feet touched as a nineteen-year-old freshman in the fall of 1968 — only months after Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered on a balcony in Memphis, only weeks after cities burned, only days after the nation seemed to tear itself in half. It was a time when highway air still carried the smell of tear gas, and newspapers read more like warnings than reports. Yet there stood Southeastern Oklahoma State, opening its dorms and classrooms as if the country weren’t trembling beneath it. Boys like Clarence were expected to balance English papers with the possibility of their draft number being called before midterms. And even in that fragile moment, some things hadn’t changed at all.
His first morning of classes made that painfully clear. A professor — gray-haired, polite, and unbothered — paused during roll call, looked up, and announced to the entire room that he had never had the pleasure of teaching a Negro before. Every head turned toward Clarence with the same quiet astonishment one might reserve for a newly discovered specimen. Another professor, a self-declared progressive from California, proved no kinder. When Clarence gave speeches in his naturally strong, deep voice—avoiceshapedbyBlack churches and lively kitchens — the man marked him down for “resonance.” That one word earned Clarence his first failing grade, and the professor left town on grade-posting day, leaving no chance for an appeal. That single F dragged his GPA into dangerous territory — dangerous enough that Coach Bob Thomas called him into his office and told him, without raising his voice, that if he didn’t reach a 2.0 by semester’s end, he would be sent home, the one place Clarence had sworn never to return defeated. That promise had held him upright since the day he watched his mother’s car disappear around the corner of Shearer Hall. Failure was not an option. Not now. Not ever.
Football, at least, spoke a languageClarenceunderstood. Sweat. Hitting. Speed. Work. On the field, a man’s color didn’t change how fast he ran the 40 or whether he could make a tackle in the open field. Even so, the old rules shadowed the sport. When the team traveled, the coaches walked into cafés first — scouts for safety — checking whether Black players would be served or whether they’d need to get back on the bus and drive until they found a place willing to feed them. More than once, Clarence sat on a bus while a waitress shook her head inside the café, unwilling to test the mood of the local regulars. Sometimes the team pulled away hungry, back onto the dark highways of the South.
And then came the night at Langston — the only historically Black university Southeastern played — when Clarence turned in the kind of game that sends a young man off the field walking tall, muscles aching, jersey soaked, adrenaline still singing in his bloodstream. The lights were bright, the crowd loud, and for once in his life, the stands were filled with faces that looked like his. Victory tasted good.
He was heading toward the locker room, helmet still on, shoulder pads still strapped tight, when an older white fan — caught up in the thrill of conquest and the reflexes of another era — rushed over, grabbed Clarence by the pads, shook him in celebration, and shouted, “We beat them…” ending with a word I will not print. A word carved from the old vocabulary of Little Dixie, a word that belonged to the days when men like Clarence were expected to stay in their place.
The man yelled it with the easy confidence of someone certain he was talking to a white player. But then Clarence lifted his chin, and from inside the helmet the man suddenly met a pair of dark, steady eyes and dark skin. In that split second, the fan’s whole face fell apart — his grip loosened, his mouth opened, and the realization washed over him like cold water: habit had spoken before his heart or his mind had a chance to intervene.
Clarence didn’t respond in anger. Didn’t need to. He walked on, letting the man’s embarrassment trail behind him like a shadow. It was one more reminder — one he neither invited nor allowed to define him — that long after laws change, old reflexes still twitch in the people who grew up under them.
That moment — like so many others — could have cracked a young man into bitterness. But Clarence didn’t bend that way. Instead, he leaned into the lessons that had shaped him before Durant ever tried to teach him anything new. Work hard. Stay focused. Carry yourself with dignity. Let nothing and no one shrink your spirit. Those ruleswereolderthanJimCrow andstrongerthanthemenwho enforced it.
Little by little, college began to change him. He moved to the front row in classrooms. He kept his notebook open. He studied until the words made sense. He ran sprints until his lungs burned and his legs wobbled. He built discipline with the same hands that had once carried buckets of water from the artesian well on Oil Mill Hill. And when he walked back across campus at night, past the lingering ghosts, he did so with a new kind of certainty settling into his bones: No town, no professor, no prejudice, no history, and no man would decide his worth.
College did not make him bitter. It made him better. It trained his mind the way football had trained his body — through strain, sweat, and insistence. And through it all, the lessons of Oil Mill Hill kept him grounded, reminding him that determination was the one inheritance no law could touch and no sundown sign could erase.
By the summer of 1972, Clarence’s world stretched far beyond Oil Mill Hill. He had his degree from Southeastern and his first real job waiting in Atoka, where he would teach world history, Black history, and coach sports. He spent that summer devouring everything he could about African civilizations — Mansa Musa, Timbuktu, the Zulu and Ashanti empires — and the long, complex arc of the African experience in America. It opened his eyes in ways his own schooling never had and gave him a deeper gratitude for the strength of the ancestors whoseshouldershestoodupon.
Atoka greeted him with kindness, but being the only Black staff member brought its familiar weight; it also sharpened his appreciation for those who welcomed him, encouraged him, and believed he had something of value to offer. Those early years taught him that gratitude and humility couldcarryamanthrougheven the most unsteady beginnings.
Graduate school followed, but life had other plans. Altus, Oklahoma, called with a coaching job, and Clarence drove west into a landscape he had never imagined. The dry air, the Quartz Mountains, the roar of C-5A Galaxies overhead — it felt like stepping into a new world. Head Coach Jim Cromartie trusted him immediately, handing him the defensive backs in a storied 5A program.Clarencerosetomeet the challenge. With help from mentors like Gerald O’Dell and OU’s Jerry Proctor, he learned quickly, grew in confidence, and helped lead Altus to one of the best seasons in school history. In that place, far from home, Clarence found not just success but the deep gratitude that comes from people investing in you when they don’t have to.
America was changing. Vietnam raged. Watergate cracked open. Yet for Black Americans, the doorways of possibility widened one step at a time — not because anyone handed out prosperity, but because legal barriers were finally falling away. Clarence saw the shifting world around him and felt thankful, not resentful. The old restraints were loosening. A man could rise on his merit.
His next move — Amarillo, Texas — brought more opportunity and the first workplace where he wasn’t the only Black staff member. But even there, the past whispered through the mascot and the traditions. He coached, taught, worked hard, and kept climbing. Then Wichita State University called, offering him a position in the college ranks — a leap few young Black coaches were ever offered in that era.
Wichita brought growth, mistakes, and hard lessons. But under the guidance of Coach Jim Wright and Coach Phillip Fulmer, he learned to build an offense, recruit, and lead young men. Players like Bob Cicero and Leon Hobbs tested him, believed in him, and taught him that trust is earned, not given. Recruiting drove him into small towns and unfamiliar territory, and although racism surfaced here and there, Clarence met it with the same even-tempered resolve that had carried him from childhood: acknowledge the pain, but do not let it claim you.
Through all of this, gratitude remained the steady flame in his lamp. He knew he wasn’t rising alone. He understood that every person along the way — teachers, coaches, administrators, fellow staff, even strangers who offered a hand at the right moment — became part of the scaffolding that helped him And beneath every success — every promotion, every open door, every long highway betweenonejobandthenext— was the old teaching instilled back on Oil Mill Hill: gratitude steadies a man. Gratitude strengthens the mind. Gratitude guards the heart. And gratitude, more than any accomplishment, is what allows a life to rise above hardship without bitterness.
When Clarence arrived in Ames, Iowa, in January of 1979, it felt less like a career move and more like an exile to another planet. Snow towered along the roads, temperatures plunged to minus-fifty-one wind chills, and the landscape— flat, frozen, windswept— bore no resemblance to the red dirt of Oklahoma he carried in his bones. He didn’t own a winter coat on the day he stepped off the plane. He simply tightened his jaw, told himself he would adapt, and got to work.
Iowa State was a different universe from any level he had coached before. The Big Eight was ruled by giants—Oklahoma, Nebraska, the great Midwestern programs that expected championships the way farmers expect spring. Clarence had entered a realm where talent, strategy, and sheer willpower mattered more than anything he had faced.Theothernewassistants bunkedtogethertemporarilyin a windswept townhouse west of Ames, a cramped outpost for men who saw each other only long enough to grab a suitcase before heading back out across the country to recruit.
Clarence’sterritoryexpanded quickly—St. Louis, Miami, Texas, Kansas. He could rent cars, walk into restaurants, and stay in hotels without fear of being turned away, somethingunimaginablejusta decade earlier. Yet the old tensions surfaced in unexpected places. Once, while driving through St. Louis during tense anti-busing protests, he watched angry parents hurl rocks at school buses filled with Black children. It shook him, not because racism surprised him—that was impossible— but because he had begun to hope specific battles were fading.
Professionally, the climb grew steeper. In that fiercely competitive league, Clarence had to sharpen every tool he owned—coaching, planning, recruiting, motivating, communicating, and leading under pressure. He visited NFL camps, watched the sport’s great minds work, and tried to absorb every lesson he could. Yetinquietermoments,another question pressed in: Should he remain a coach forever, or did he owe his future family something more stable, more grounded, more lasting than the nomadic life of a football assistant?
His four years on the Iowa State staff were among the richest of his career. Donnie Duncan had assembled a coaching team that would scatter into greatness—Mack Brown, Larry Coyer, Charlie Sadler, Sparky Woods, Jim Williams, Gerald O’Dell— men who would win national championships, lead storied programs, and carve their names into the sport. Being part of that family gave Clarence a deep sense of pride. But the seasons themselves were unforgiving. A bright 1979 debut gave way to a 3–8 record. A stronger 1980 season ignited hope, climaxing with a landmark victory over Iowa andasoaringnationalranking, only for the dream of a bowl game to collapse on a fourthand-one stop against Kansas State that crushed the spirit of the entire program. Clarence felt it deeply. All that work, all that preparation, undone in a single moment.
The disappointment was more than professional. It jolted something deeper. For the first time, Clarence began asking himself whether coaching alone could define the life he wanted. He loved the game. He loved the players. But as an assistant, his brilliance was invisible. Wins belonged to the head coach. Losses fell on everyone. The long nights, the endless film sessions, the emotional investment—none of it could shield him from the truth that the profession devoured time, and time was the one thing a father could not afford to lose. He vowed that whenhehadchildren,hewould not vanish into the shadows of a stadium. He would not be a ghost in their lives. He wanted to be a father, not a visitor.
Even amid this turmoil, life opened a door. He met Beth Schoening, the quiet, striking brunette in the Iowa State ticket office, and the rhythm of his days changed. Their lunchtime conversations turned into something deeper, something rooted in kindness and curiosity. Dating outside one’s race had once been dangerous; dating a coworker came with its own complications. But Ames was different. It was gentle, neighborly, unhurried. Their relationship grew the way winter melts into spring—slowly, steadily, quietly. Beth’s family needed time to accept it, but love has a way of carving its own path, and in time, it did.
Bytheearly1980s,Clarence had reached a crossroads. The staff he worked with remained extraordinary, but the grind of the profession and the longing for a grounded family life pushed him toward a reckoning. The 1981 season—the wins, the heartbreaks, the close calls—made the decision clearer. His love for the game was still real, but the cost had become too high. He wanted to build something lasting. He wanted the chance to become the man his stepfather had modeled—steady, present, principled, grateful. Football had taught him discipline, strategy, and resilience, but it could not give him the life he envisioned for himself.
And so the seeds of change began to sprout. Seeds planted years earlier on Oil Mill Hill, when a young boy learned that a man’s worth was measured not by applause but by responsibility. Seedswateredthrough tragedy, perseverance, and the stubborn belief that in America, what matters most is not where you start, but where you choose to go. Clarence’s last years in coaching felt like a long goodbye he didn’t yet know he was saying.
The 1982 season at Iowa State started with promise and ended with a familiar ache. After a tough, narrow loss at Tennessee, the Cyclones clawed back to a respectable 4-1-1 stretch, including another big win over Iowa. But then the bottom fell out. Four straight losses closed the season and left them 4-6-1, 1-5-1 in the Big Eight—a record that didn’t reflect the work, the hope, or the sacrifices that had gone into it. Still, Clarence did what coaches do: he kept recruiting, kept grinding, kept believing they could turn the corner.
The corner never came.
One night in January 1983, in a Miami hotel room after a day on the recruiting trail, the phone rang after midnight. It washeadcoachDonnieDuncan calling to say he’d resigned. Just like that, Clarence’s time at Iowa State ended with a few words on a crackling phone line. In the morning, he caught a flight home, carrying the quiet knowledge that the life he’d built in Ames had vanished overnight.
On the connecting flight through St. Louis, fate slid him into the middle seat between two men who represented a very different world: U.S. Senator Roger Jepsen by the window, and Larry Miller— president of Ruan Transportation and a major Iowa business leader—on the aisle. Clarence knew Miller slightly through Cyclone boosters and recruiting visits, remembered being ushered into his corner office high above Des Moines with a prized prospect and feeling the weight of that room. Now they were elbow-to-elbow on a commercial flight, and the conversation turned to what came next.
Miller didn’t mince words. He understood that stepping out of coaching was hard; most coaches he knew either drifted into insurance, car sales, or back to high school sidelines. He offered Clarence something different: a way into the business world, into what he called “something relevant.” When you get the boy’s game out of your system, he told him, call me. It was blunt, almost rough, but it lodged in Clarence’s mind. The offer was real. The door was open. He just wasn’t quite ready to walk through it.
Instead, another door opened first. Clarence’s close friend Gerald O’Dell called from the University of Minnesota— he’d just been hired there and wanted Clarence as his quarterbacks and receivers coach. The job was a step up in some ways, a lifeline in others. There was only one catch on the home front: Beth told him she would not move north as a girlfriend. If she went, she was going as his wife. They married in March 1983 and headed together into a future that looked promising on paper and precarious in reality.
Minnesota football was in trouble before Clarence ever drew up a play. The team was rebuilding, fielding eleven freshmen as starters while facing Nebraska, Michigan, and Ohio State. They stole a win at Rice in his first game as offensive play-caller on a fluke fullback draw that succeeded only because two defenders accidentally tackled each other. The luck didn’t last. In their second game, Nebraska—one of the greatest teams ever assembled—hung 84 points on them in the Metrodome, the worst loss in Minnesota history. The season ended 1–10. They had been badly outmanned, andeveryoneknewit.
When the final whistle of that year blew, Clarence heard something else beneath it: a verdict. He called Larry Miller. The boy’s game, at least at that level, was out of his system. He was ready to step off the carousel.
In January 1984, Clarence and Beth packed their belongings and drove south to Des Moines. He wasn’t stepping into a corner office or a polished corporate suite. Larry Miller insisted he learn the business from the ground up, so Clarence started as a rental manager trainee in Ruan’s leasing division—one of the biggest truck-leasing operations in the country. On his first day at the maintenance shop on East 18th Street, he stepped into a world that looked and smelled nothing like a football facility: diesel fumes, peeling paint, roaring engines, grease-slick floors, mechanics in coveralls shouting over air tools. It felt like walking onto the set of a Jimmy Hoffa movie.
He was a stranger there— Black, new to business, fresh out of college coaching—trying to learn an industry most people only pass on the highway. The men in the shop didn’t knowwhattomakeofhim,and he didn’t know what to make of them. But work is its own language, and Clarence spoke it fluently.
He changed transmissions, washed trucks, helped with lot checks, learned to identify tractors by engine, axle count, and weight ratings.
Early on, a sales manager asked him bluntly why he thought he could make it “in a white man’s world.” Crude as it was, Clarence decided not to treat it as an insult, but as a challenge. He knew his history. Heknewthefoundershad built a nation on ideals that took generations to reach men like him. He knew the stories of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, and his own mother Lena, who refused to let life define their limits. He believed, deep down, that in America— especially now that the legal barriers were gone—the only ceiling left was the one you accepted. So he set out to prove, mostly to himself, that he could thrive in that world, too.
Within a few years, he had moved from mechanic’s helper to local manager, then to a regional role in Kansas City overseeing multiple locations. He and Beth welcomed their daughter Chelsea in 1985, bought their first home, and built a life that would have been impossible for a Black boy born into Jim Crow Madill to imagine. Ruan gave him training, responsibility, and opportunity without anyone needing a diversity initiative to justify it. People helped him because he worked, learned, and showed up. He pushed himself becausehewantedtohonorthe chance he’d been given.
Then, just when his footing in business felt sure, the tug of athletics returned. In 1988, Gerald O’Dell—now athletic director at Northern Illinois University—called again. He needed an associate AD he could trust to help run football and basketball, and he wanted Clarence. The offer was too good to ignore. They moved to DeKalb, navigating the strain of a house that hadn’t sold and a period where Clarence lived as a single father with a threeyear- old while Beth stayed behind temporarily to keep her court reporter job. That month of braids, breakfasts, and bedtime stories became one of the sweetest seasons of his life.
His year at NIU was brief but intense: a historic football winoverWisconsininMadison, a frightening brawl at DePaul that nearly turned into a riot, and a pressure-cooker head coaching search that tested every skill he was developing asaleader—timing,judgment, and the ability to make hard calls under a ticking clock. It felt, in many ways, like the perfect bridge between who he had been as a coach and who he was becoming as a businessman.
Looking back, that whole stretch would become part of Clarence’s Thanksgiving ledger. None of it was easy. Much of it was humbling. But threaded through it all was the same quiet truth that runs through his whole life: every setback became a doorway; every hard turn carried some hidden grace. And in each new place—on the sideline, in the shop, in the sales office, in the athletic department—there were people willing to help if he was willing to work.
That, in the end, is the spine of his story and the heart of its gratitude: he never let bitterness close his eyes to the helpers alongtheway,andhenever forgot that in this country, whatever the obstacles, he had been given the chance to rise.
Clarence’s year at Northern Illinois was proof that he could succeed anywhere he was planted. He thrived as an associate athletic director— building budgets, handling NCAA compliance, managing multiple sports, and tackling problems from the other side of the whistle. It was energizing work, and he was good at it. Still, a question kept nagging him: Am I doing this because it’s my calling, or because it’s what people expect a former coach to do? He didn’t want to live boxed in as “the coach who moved upstairs.” He still wanted something different, something that stretched him in a new way.
Then the phone rang one February night.
On the line was Barry Switzer— the legendary Oklahoma coach—and with him Lee Roy Selmon and Donnie Duncan. They weren’t calling to reminisce. They were offering him the job of running backs coach at OU. For a kid from Madill who’d once dreamed of wearing that crimson and cream as a player, it was the golden ticket. Coaching at Oklahoma underSwitzerwas,inhismind, the mountaintop. He hung up buzzing with excitement.
Beth heard it in his voice before he said a word. “Was that a job offer?” she asked. “Yes.” “Back to coaching?” she said, flat. “Yes,” he answered—and that’s when the temperature in the room changed.
Beth had no interest in going back to the old life: constant moves, unstable schedules, kids raised by a parent who was always on the road or on the field. She wanted something radical by football-world standards—astablehome,kids whosleptinthesamebedrooms year after year, a husband who was present, not a visitor. That night, they agreed to think, pray, and talk again.
Thenextmorning,Clarence walked into the office torn clean in half. The dream job on one side; the life he knew, deep down, his wife and kids deserved on the other. Gerald O’Dell, his boss and friend, already knew about the offer. ADs always get the first phone call. Gerald asked if he was going to take it. Clarence could only say, honestly, “I don’t know.” Then life did what it always seems to do when we’re at a crossroads—it added another fork.
As Gerald left his office, the phone rang again. This time it was Larry Miller from Ruan, the hard-edged Marine-turned-executive who had believed in Clarence back when he was starting out in the truck-leasing world. Bob McNamara, Ruan’s respected national sales leader, had suffered a stroke. Larry wanted Clarence back—not as a rental manager this time, but to learn Bob’s job and eventually step into a senior corporate role.
In a single day, Clarence suddenly had three futures laid out in front of him: stay at NIU, go back to big-time coaching at Oklahoma, or re-enter Ruan at a much higher level. That evening, he and Beth laid them all out on the table. Staying at NIU was safe but unsatisfying. Oklahoma was theboyhooddream—butwould drag the family into the same grind he was trying to escape. TheRuanrolemeantcorporate travel, high expectations, and pressure—but also stability, roots, and proximity to Beth’s family in Iowa. Then Beth told him she was pregnant.
They already had a fiveyear- old. Now another baby was on the way. Suddenly the abstract question of “What do I want?” was replaced with a much sharper one: What do they need? The answer was clear. He turned down Switzer. He left NIU. They headed back to Iowa and to Ruan.
If that choice stung at all, he didn’tletitsour.Ruanexpected performance, not sentiment. Larry wanted him there, but that didn’t buy him protection. There was no tokenism, no soft landing because he was Black. You produced, or you were gone. Clarence preferred it that way. He didn’t want lowered bars or unearned status; he wanted the same standard as everyone else.
In his new corporate role, he oversaw conventions and trade shows and followed up with national-level clients. For twenty years he crisscrossed the country—every state in the Lower 48—selling transportation solutions, nurturing relationships, and representing a company that had taken a chance on him. He wasn’t the richest man in the room, but he built exactly what he’d hoped for: a good house, college for his kids, security for his family, and work he could be proud of.
By 2010, after twenty-five years with Ruan, he stepped into one last act in his working life: a position with RUD ChainUSA,theAmericanarm of a German industrial giant. That job took him somewhere the boy from Oil Mill Hill could never have pictured—into the forests and factories of southern Germany, and then, one weekend, onto a train bound for Vienna.
HetouredRUD’sheadquarters, marveling at the way a quiet office building hid a full-scale factory buried stories below ground. He walked medieval streets in Rothenburg, shared beers with locals still dressed in Oktoberfest leather and lace, and then rode the rails into Austria. When he finally stood on a bridge over the Danube, looking out at a city shaped by Mozart, emperors, and revolutions, something in him went still.
He thought of 1963, of a Black child in segregated Madill, drinking sugar water, dodging a charging horse, carrying jugs from an artesian well, living in a county where a man like him couldn’t sit at just any counter or sleep in just any hotel. If someone had told that boy he’d one day be free to fly across oceans, stay where hewished,walkforeignstreets, and stand on the banks of that old European river, it would’ve sounded like a cruel joke. Yet there he was.
That moment on the Danube is as close to a single image of Clarence’s life as you can get: a man who started with almost nothing, who walked through losses, false starts, and hard choices, and still ended up looking around with more gratitude than regret. A man thankful for a wife who pulled him toward stability, for mentors who opened doors, for bosses who told him the truth, for workers in greasy shops who taught him a new trade, for a country that—however flawed—gave him the room to rise.
IfThanksgivingmeansanything, it’s that kind of reckoning: standingwhereyouare,remembering where you started, and realizing that the distance between the two is filled, not just with your own effort, but with a thousand undeserved mercies. Clarence knows that distance better than most. And that’s why his story belongs on a Thanksgiving table.
Clarence sometimes finds himself wondering what happened to the fierce competitive fire that once burned so brightly in Black America — the fire that pushed men and women to earn degrees no one expected them to earn, to build businesses in hostile cities, to raise up Black Wall Street in Tulsa, to become coaches, entrepreneurs, and leaders long before anyone invited them to the table. In the world he grew up in, every Black parent he knew raised their children to love their country, to work harder than anyone else, and to believe, without apology, that no one could tell them who they were or what they could become. They were propelled byKing’s“IHaveaDream”and by the thunderous cadence of “I AmSomebody,”wordsshouted in packed churches and dusty community centers as if the future itself depended on the belief behind them.
For Clarence, that message wasn’t abstract—it was lived. Black Americans had fought in every conflict the nation ever waged: alongside colonists at Bunker Hill and Yorktown, under Jackson at New Orleans, on both sides of the War of 1812, and in every war since. For generations, that service became a rallying cry: We have shed blood for this country—whycan’twebreathe freely in it?
He grew up watching his mother put on her white maid’s uniform every holiday, leaving to cook a feast for the Brillharts before coming home to cook another one for her own family. She never bowed her head. She was Lena—fierce, proud, self-reliant. Clarence Moore, the man who raised him, was the same: twenty years of Fridays, driving to Hugo or Paris, Texas, to work on the Frisco Railroad, never complaining, never asking for anything but effort, honesty, and pride. In their home, the only true disgrace was doing somethingthatbroughtshame to the family name.
TheCivilRightsMovement, asClarenceexperienceditfrom afar, wasn’t about handouts or pity. It was about forcing America to honor its own creed—thatallmenarecreated equal, endowed with the right to life and liberty, that these truths were supposed to be selfevident. Andtheextraordinary thing, Clarence says, is that the promise actually worked. He is living proof.
After returning from Germany, that truth came into clearer focus when two Iowa leaders—businessman Doug Reichardt and former Iowa State coach Jim Hallihan—approached himaboutleadingthe Iowa Sports Foundation. Clarence had long admired Doug, and he considered Jim one of thefinestmenhe’deverknown: gracious, intuitive, endlessly concerned for others. Both men believed in him.
So, at age sixty-one, Clarence stepped into what he thought would be his last and most rewarding act: leading an organization that touched every corner of the state through the Iowa Games, Live Healthy Iowa, and Adaptive Sports Iowa. But following a legend is a curse as old as storytelling, and three years later he realized what everyone else already knew: no one could replace Hallihan. That didn’t diminish what he gained—those years traveling Iowa, meeting people who embodied “Iowa nice,” reinforced his belief that goodness is not performative. It’s cultural. It’s lived.
Leaving the Iowa Sports Foundation meant facing the question every older worker knows too well: What now? Who wants a sixty-four-yearold man, even one with a rich résumé? Clarence did what he’d always done—picked up the phone. A friend told him about an opening at Solar Transport, part of the Krause family of companies. Clarence knew the president of the company had never seemed particularly warm toward him when they’d served together on a board, but he weighed the risk. He could easily walk away, telling himself he wasn’t hired “because…” But that wasn’t his way. He reached out to two board members he trusted—both men he’d worked with for years. They went to bat for him, and he got the job as vice president of sales, closing out his career with dignity and purpose. He stayed at Solar Transport until retiring in 2018.
Through all of it—the victories, the defeats, the disappointments, the surprises— Clarence held fast to the truth instilled by his parents and his generation: that America, for all its failings, remains a place where character can carry a man farther than circumstances. And that if you meet the world with gratitude, grit, and the willingness to work harder than anyone expects, there is no telling where you might end up.
For Clarence, that belief wasn’t theory—it was his life. A boy raised in Jim Crow Madill, sleeping under a leaky roof and watching his mother leave every holiday morning in her white uniform, somehow lived to see Germany, Vienna, corporate boardrooms, locker rooms, and leadership roles across the country.
Across his career—teaching, coaching, managing, leading—he learned that some people choose the hard path toward success, while others choose the easier path toward failure. He invested his time in the first group, grateful for the chancetopushsomeonehigher than they believed they could climb. As he aged, he came to believe that we all build equity over a lifetime—emotional, spiritual, professional—and that the measure of a life well lived is whether we invest that equity in someone else before the clock runs out.
He likes to say, “We don’t choose our times; we only choose our response.” And he lived that out. Born on the Fourth of July, he saw patriotism not as a slogan but as a thank-you note written across the decades. “I love this country,” he would say—not with naïveté, but with gratitude for the good it had given even in the long shadow of Jim Crow.
His earliest lessons came from Mount Triumph Baptist Church: faith in God, faith in the promise of America, faith in everyday people doing everyday good. Even when the television flashed images of dogs and firehoses, he held fast to the words that all men are created equal and endowed with rights no government can give or take.
Years later, riding along with a Des Moines police officer, he watched a seventeenyear- old boy—Black, frightened, convincedhewouldnever live to see twenty—say he planned to quit school because “there’s no point” in a racist world. That answer struck Clarence like a blow. Because when he was that age, in the teeth of segregation, he still had hope. His elders gave him that. They preached perseverance, not despair. Gratitude, not surrender.
That boy had never been told the whole story—the story of Black Americans who had risen, endured, built, and contributed. Clarence believes firmly that without gratitude for what previous generations endured and achieved, a child is left feeling doomed. He spent his life trying to pass on the hope he had been given.
Some ideas circulating in modern life trouble him deeply—the suggestion that academic rigor is unfair to Black students, the insistence that permanent preferences are needed to prop up achievement. To Clarence, these were forms of soft sabotage dressed as compassion. They lower expectations for the very children who needed them most.
He believes the Black middle class has risen not from governmentprogramsbutfrom grit, faith, opportunity seized, and families that taught their children to work, try, stumble, rise, and try again. He acknowledges racism honestly, but he rejects hopelessness entirely. Thanksgiving anchors him, and it shapes his worldview.
He revered Frederick Douglass— another man who refused to surrender to despair. Douglass found hope in conviction, not in assistance. Clarence believes the same: that constant national focus on race can become its own trap, both for those oppressed and those eager to play savior.
He often says he didn’t vote for Barack Obama because of policy disagreements, not race—and he considered that a testament to progress. In Clarence’s eyes, the antidote to poverty is never mysterious: finish high school, don’t have children outside marriage, get a job—any honest job. Hard truths, he admits, but truths born of gratitude for the opportunities carved out by those who came before.
He believes Black Americans have proven they are capable of excellence in every field—politics, medicine, law, science, the military, business, and the arts. Racism still exists, but it no longer writes the final chapter. “Unless,” he adds quietly, “we let it.”
And he loves this country. Fiercely. Thankfully. He loves it with a gratitude forged in fire—Jim Crow, Civil Rights, moments of triumph and seasons of heartbreak alike. He loves it because he has seen it change. Because he believes it could change again.
In the end, Clarence’s life whispers a simple truth that outlives every hardship he ever faced. He never measured his days by what was withheld from him, nor by the doors that took too long to open. He counted what he had—faith, family, friends, purpose—and he found that it was enough. Even in the leanest seasons, when the world pressed hard against him, he gave thanks for the things that could not be taken: the strength to rise, the courage to endure, the grace to keep walking forward. That was his quiet genius. While others tallied their losses, Clarence tallied his blessings.
And that is the lesson he shares, like a lantern for the rest of us. If we focus on what is missing, the world will always seem small and bitter. But if we acknowledge what remains—of the mercies scattered through each day—we find what Clarence carried all his life: a peace that the world cannot explain or take away. His story teaches us that thanksgiving is not just a holiday or a feeling, but a posture of the heart. When we choose gratitude over grievance, abundance over scarcity, and faith over fear, the fog lifts and the path becomes clear.
Clarence lives that truth. And if we follow his example— if we thank God for what we have, instead of mourning what we don’t—we too will find that same quiet, steady peace that carried him through every storm.
And as you carry Clarence’s story with you into the days ahead, know that there is more—much more—of his hard-won wisdom set down in his new autobiography, Making Your Life Worth It, a Memoir. It is a testament to the same spirit that shaped his life: gratitude in the lean years, courage in the difficult ones, and faith that tomorrow can rise brighter than today. His book is now available in bookstores and on Amazon, for anyone who wants to sit a little longer with the man who learnedtocounthisblessings— and lived a life that proved the power of doing so.
